"The core of our American democracy is the right to vote. Implicit in that right is the notion that that vote be private, that vote be secure, and that vote be counted as it was intended when it was cast by the voter. And I think what we're encountering is a pivotal moment in our democracy where all of that is being called into question." (more here)
Kevin Shelley, former California Sec. of State
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Help Prevent a Rush to Insecure Voting in Illinois
UPDATE: On Tuesday May 26, the Illinois House rejected a Senate amendment to HB 85. The amendment called for the Legislature's majority party to outnumber the minority party on the proposed Internet Voting Commission. Now the bill goes back to the Senate for possible reconsideration. There are just a few days left in the session: tell lead sponsors Senator Michael Bond and Senator Don Harmon, as well as members of the Senate leadership, that this bill should be stopped.
To recap, HB 85 would establish an Illinois Internet Voting Commission to "study and recommend to the General Assembly" a method of voting over the Internet, starting in 2012.
Internet voting presents severe security challenges, and the language of HB 85 appears to require that the newly created Commission recommend some form of Internet voting.
In 2005, Illinois lawmakers passed a law requiring that each voting system must offer a paper record that the voter can verify before casting his or her vote. There is excellent reason for this law: electronic vote tallies must be verifiable independently of computer software. It is unclear if an Internet voting system would provide a voter-verifiable paper record.
The Internet can do many things to improve our elections - blank absentee ballots can be sent via e-mail, and campaign finance and voter registration information can be provided easily to the public via Web sites. Sending our votes online may seem a next logical step in an age of technology. But sending voted, secret ballots online presents far greater security challenges than the financial transactions people conduct on the Internet. For example, when a person uses a credit card to make a payment or purchase a product online, there are records of the transaction in her bank's record, and with the merchant. Not so with voting: because the state of Illinois's laws require a secret ballot, there is no way for a voter to know that her ballot was recorded as she intended, and there is no physical ballot for election officials to use to verify the electronic record, as there is when a voter votes by mail.
Recent reports from the National Institute on Standards and Technology and the Pew Center on the States reinforce these concerns. As well, in 2008 a group of prominent computer scientists and technologists issued a statement on Internet voting that noted that several "serious, potentially insurmountable, technical challenges must be met if elections conducted by transmitting votes over the internet are to be verifiable." The signers of the statement include Bruce Schneier, one of the world's authorities on computer security, as well as computer scientists from government, the private sector, and leading academic institutions such as Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Iowa.
YOU CAN HELP: Tell your lawmakers to stop House Bill 85. Use the message below or edit it as you see fit. Thank you for taking action!
